


Lost and Found

by LSDAndKizuki



Category: Original Work
Genre: 19th Century, Christianity, Gen, Historical References, Missionaries, Period-Typical Racism, Slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-07
Updated: 2017-04-07
Packaged: 2018-10-16 03:39:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10562940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LSDAndKizuki/pseuds/LSDAndKizuki
Summary: Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound.





	

It begins with a small boy with china skin and ocean eyes, and his father, who is standing by their fireplace with a face lit from below as though by hellfire, and who says to the boy “What is the worst punishment our Lord can bestow upon us?”

Without a moment’s hesitation, the boy responds. “Death.”

He will later learn that he has answered wrong. The correct response is in fact _denial –_ the denial of heaven and grace, and the denial of forgiveness. For the moment, his father with bright black eyes humours him. “What makes you say that, m’boy? Do you fear the fires and brimstone?”

The flaxen curls that came from his mother tremble, as the boy shakes his head. “No, Father, I fear my death, whether I head towards the Lord or the Devil.”

Without much feeling, his father reprimands. “Blasphemy to denounce the bosom of the Lord.”

The words that come next do not belong to a boy with sandy hair, clear eyes and daisy-petal skin. They leave his mouth without his bidding: _If I should live through a thousand Tortures, I should yet have Hope. If I should live through the Fire and Brimstone of our Mother Earth, yet not die, I should still have Hope, for as long as I live, I may have the Potential to live better, but once I am dead, that Potential should vanish, and that is what I fear._

His china skin, and his ocean eyes, they praise. China, the sea – these things are foreign, but the boy has lived seventeen years long enough to know that these foreign things belong to him and his country. They were fought for, he is reminded, by his grandparents’ grandparents, so he decides he will fight for them as well – just not with bayonets. The word of the Lord must be spread, and if china and tea may belong to Britain, it is only fair that the love of Christ be shared among all the colonies.

He takes the word to India, where they worship shining statues, and gather around the glittering shrines like flies in a candle’s heat. He is disheartened by the lack of interest. Asia in general has little heart for it, but something in Africa speaks to him. Their dark hands reach for him eagerly, drinking his elixir of promises and laws; the very sand seems to hearken after his every footstep. He clutches to his heart a black book of prayers, and every night he kisses his rosary and begs in a voice that does not belong to him that he _never lose Hope._

He has wondered now for many years, whose voice it is. It matches his own vocal cords, but only just. He feels as though he is being forced down to lower vibrations, longer syllables, and heavier tongue. It is only when he thinks of death that this subtle metamorphosis occurs. For a long time he entertains the idea that God – or at least, as compromise, one of his angels – is speaking through him, but this cannot be so. Why would the Lord choose him and his cowardly fears of death? It is a beautiful paradox. When he bares his soul in the holiest of ways, his voice serves to pull him downwards in pitch, into an almost savage sound. His deepest worship, and the closest he ever seems to grow towards the Lord, is marked by the base earth. After some time, he gives up on trying to find the source of this strange anomaly. In his mind, he refers to it as his _grace._

It is only a matter of time before he is sent on one of those forsaken Hell-ships.

The key, he is told, is to detach yourself from your surroundings, so he does. For the most part, they all reside in the dark under deck, and any sounds from them are drowned by the fury of the waves. In the hours when they are all beneath, and he is above, he can pretend that he is a missionary again, on his way to some exciting shore, where red-skinned or black-skinned or brown-skinned children wait to learn his teachings. The illusion shatters whenever he is forced to go down into that festering hole, lined with bodily fluids and filled with fearful naked bodies. He must face them then, in all their horrific splendour.

He is disgusted by them; he cannot bear to look at them. The effect, he decides, is not unlike that of visiting a farm. He enjoys a good suckling pig in a very separate way to how he marvels at the sight of living piglets trotting playfully. He takes two sugars in his tea, and is capable of painstakingly trying to reach the souls of all black bodies he finds on distant lands. Riding these ships is like standing in a slaughterhouse: the two images are forced grotesquely together.

Still he preaches, for the benefit of the tired sailors, but his words feel more like husks, shrivelled as the sea-shrunk boards of his ship. His grace, too, seems to turn on him. There is anger in it now, as he ponders death, as though his own prayers forsook him. It is not self-hatred, because he is certain now that the voice is not his own, although it speaks of him in the first person: _for every Torture I may suffer on Earth, I inflict a Thousand more, and how may a Man have Hope while he deprives others? Whatever Fire and Brimstone lies in store for me here is Nothing by comparison to the Punishment I will receive after my wasted Life…_

Not just anger in it, but despair, and a feeling of eyes looking at him through the dark. They judge him through his sleep, rocking him harder than the slaps of waves against the hull.

One night those waves lap harder than ever, during a deadly storm. Sleep is a pointless endeavour, as the ship heaves like a sick stomach, and _he_ feels sick, from the motion and from the curious mingling of rain and salt-water spraying him. Above deck he clings to the solid wooden mast, closes his eyes, and attempts to drown out the din of cries and roars with internal prayers. His feet skid helplessly on the wet board; he loses balance and his hands slide down the mast, until he lies flat, his ear naked against the deck. His little black book is sodden and heavy – he tries with all his might not to think of the jostling bodies below deck, crashing into each other, trapped in darkness, dumb with fear…

In the microscopic gaps of sound between the rise and fall of waves, he begins to hear it. It is comprised of long-held notes, intertwining in complex harmony. All of the voices sing low and earthy, even the women’s, as if the soul of the soil were given tongue. Every other second, the roar of the sea and sky returns to drown the voices, and panic crests again inside the missionary’s chest, but once the sound has receded, the voices are still there. He does not stand up, but pushes himself closer to the deck, straining to hear them. They are oaken, like the skins of their singers, strong, unyielding, and, and…

He was sure, once, when he was that wide-eyed boy with curly hair, that the oak tree in his garden was the tallest thing in existence. He believed that its toppermost branches peaked into Heaven itself, and rested at the bosom of the Lord. It was a Tower of Babel which would never be struck down, because it was not made by sinners, but by God himself. That oak tree was a blessing, a ladder from Earth to sky which he, despite the urge, never once dared to climb.

The slaves are singing. God is here.

When the clouds are beginning to dissolve, and the jagged water-surface has smoothed some, he is able to comprehend the song’s structure. One voice dominates and the others echo, in a ritualistic dialogue which sends him straight back to his village church at Mass. The leading voice belongs to a young man, he thinks, and it has a strength and certainty in it which soothes his spirit, although he cannot understand the words. He feels as though he knows them, after all: _never lose Hope,_ the man is singing, _to lose Hope is to die twice._

They harbour at St Domingue lacking a third of the Negroes, who now float face-down in the Atlantic, pieces of untethered flotsam. He remembers the cleaning day well, as it was the first time in five days that the cargo was inspected, sifted through, and the dead sorted from the living. The sea was made dark and heavy with their weight. The tongues of the slaves have stopped singing from exhaustion, but he hears the grace all through the rest of the journey, at the sweltering Caribbean harbour, and far away in his London armchair. It sings to him, not of guilt or punishment, but of hope and death.

“I am afraid of dying,” says the missionary, experimenting. “I am afraid of it, because… Because…”

Though the memory of the grace sings loud in his ears, it is gone from his own throat. After he has wept and reddened his cheeks, he amends this fact. It is gone from his throat, but never from his heart. The thousand tortures are in action, hope is dwindling, and death is approaching.

He finds himself looking at his surroundings. There are two blackbirds in the cherry tree outside his front door, which he can see from the drawing room window. The wrought metal of his kitchen utensils glitters intermittently in broken sunlight. The day beckons him, and how much he missed, when he was seeing through blind eyes. He stands, firm as an oak; there is work to be done.

 


End file.
